The Washington Post, BANGKOK — Once seen largely as an intimidating trade competitor, a diplomatic bully and a potential military threat, China is building a new reputation among its neighbors as a responsible regional power and an essential engine of Asian economic growth, according to diplomats and analysts in Asia.
Though many in Asia remain wary of rising Chinese power, perceptions of China are shifting across the region. In Southeast Asia, China has played down territorial disputes and promised to share its growing prosperity through investments and trade benefits. In South Korea, it has replaced the United States as the top trading partner and won praise for trying to resolve the nuclear standoff with North Korea. And in Australia, Chinese President Hu Jintao last month became the first Asian leader to address parliament.
When a research group in Bangkok asked residents last month what country they consider Thailand's closest friend, about 76 percent named China. By comparison, fewer than 8 percent of residents questioned by the Kasikorn Research Center picked Japan, Thailand's top trading partner and its number one source of foreign investment. Barely 9 percent chose the United States, a longtime military ally and the world's leading importer of Thai goods.
“This government sees China as the power that will engage Asia and dominate the destiny of Asia,” said Kavi Chongkittavorn, a senior editor of the Nation newspaper group and one of the few Thais who publicly question the country's new tilt toward China. “There's a China fever going around, an excitement, and all anybody wants to talk about are the opportunities.”
China's rising status and influence present a challenge for the United States: After more than a half-century as the dominant power in Asia, the United States has been forced to consider what the emergence of a rival means for its interests and how best to respond.
The invasion of Iraq and the Bush administration's approach to fighting terrorism have reinforced an image of the United States as heavy-handed and insensitive to the opinions of other nations, diplomats and analysts in Asia said. By contrast, they said, China has gone out of its way to ease fears among its neighbors and won points by emphasizing a multilateral approach to solving problems.
“More and more, China is doing the things the United States used to do: cooperating, pushing trade, offering help. . . . People are less scared of China now,” said Sarasin Viraphol, a former Thai diplomat educated at Harvard and vice president of the CP Group, an agricultural and retail conglomerate that has invested more than $4 billion in China. “If Washington cares about its influence in the region, if it wants to win hearts and minds, it needs to do more than just talk about terrorism.”
A 'Special Relationship'
China's rising influence is obvious here in Thailand, a country that established relations with the United States more than 150 years ago and forged a military alliance with Washington that served as a bedrock of regional security during the Cold War. Thai soldiers fought alongside Americans in Korea and Vietnam, and U.S. consumers and investors are critical to the Thai economy.
A Foreign Ministry official, Sihasak Phuangketkeow, described the U.S. relationship with Thailand as “deeply rooted and special” in an interview. But in a sign of Thailand's increasing coziness with China, he quickly added that it was “not more special than relations with China and other countries.”
Since taking office in 2001, Thailand's prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, has made a point of cultivating closer ties with China, trying to position his country as Beijing's main diplomatic partner in Southeast Asia. At the request of the Chinese, his government monitors the comings and goings of Tibetan and democracy activists, as well as members of the Chinese spiritual group Falun Gong, and prevents them from entering the country when Chinese leaders are visiting, according to Thai intelligence sources.
Like many nations in Southeast Asia, Thailand used to view China with suspicion, blaming it for supporting Communist insurgents in the 1960s and '70s. Malaysia and Indonesia resented Chinese meddling on two levels: its efforts to export communism and its claims to represent the ethnic Chinese populations within their borders.
China's relations with Southeast Asia reached a low in 1995, when it occupied Mischief Reef, an atoll in the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. The 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) responded by condemning Beijing.
Winning People Over
After the 1997 Asian financial crisis, China began to repair its image. It declined to devalue its currency, which would have allowed it to profit at the expense of its weakened neighbors, and even made a nominal offer of $1 million in economic aid to Thailand. The United States, which refused to offer bilateral aid to Thailand, was blamed for the economic crisis and became a target of protests.
China has worked to minimize concerns about its rapidly modernizing military by refraining from the high-profile threats it used to hurl at Taiwan, expanding military exchanges in the region and participating in its first U.N. peacekeeping missions. It conducted joint naval exercises for the first time — with Pakistan last month and with India on Friday. China also recently proposed forming a regional conference to increase communication among Asian militaries.
Similarly, China has tried to address fears that its booming economy will draw foreign investment from elsewhere in Asia. In 1990, China received about 20 percent of all foreign investment in Asia; now, if Hong Kong is included, it receives about 80 percent.
But in speech after speech, Chinese leaders have argued that economic development in China promotes growth across Asia and have promised to further open their huge market to Asian products.
The argument is winning people over, in part because Chinese imports from the rest of Asia — everything from electronic components to iron ore — have soared in recent years.
On orders from the government, Chinese investment in Asia is growing, too, by more than 20 percent annually and by more than 40 percent in some countries. In some cases, Chinese companies are buying assets from U.S. and European investors who are pulling out. The biggest investments have been in minerals, oil and other raw materials needed to fuel the Chinese economy.
The Chinese shopping spree has persuaded neighbors to bury old hostilities. In Indonesia, a nation that once viewed China as such a threat it banned Chinese writing, a Chinese firm is now the largest offshore oil producer and another one is in negotiations to buy one of the country's major telecommunications companies.
In Australia, where fear of Communist China was once a major election issue, the government is trying to persuade the Chinese to sign a $30 billion liquefied natural gas deal that would eclipse a $25 billion contract reached with China last year, the largest trade deal in Australian history. Last month, lawmakers who were worried about offending Hu, the Chinese president, removed three invited guests — a Chinese dissident and two Tibetan activists — from the public gallery in parliament minutes before he was scheduled to give his historic address.
Closer to home, China has improved relations with all 14 countries that it borders, settling territorial disputes from Laos to Kazakhstan and narrowing its differences even with India. It signed a friendship treaty with Russia, established a security forum with Central Asia and is renovating a rail line across its southwestern border to the Vietnamese port of Haiphong.
Last year, China signed an agreement with ASEAN to exercise self-restraint around the Spratlys, which are also claimed, at least in part, by Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Taiwan. By doing so, it put the dispute on a back burner without giving up its claims to the islands, located near busy sea lanes and rich fishing waters.
China also proposed establishing a vast free trade zone with Southeast Asia by 2010, and this year it became the first non-member to sign a friendship treaty with ASEAN. At the group's conference in Indonesia last month, Wen Jiabao, the Chinese prime minister, entered a roomful of politicians and business leaders with his hands raised above his head in triumph and received a standing ovation.
The success of Chinese diplomacy in the region can be attributed in part to the rise of a generation of better-educated, better-traveled diplomats. But Chinese analysts said it also reflects a fundamental foreign policy shift in which China has decided to act like a “great power” with responsibilities across the region instead of just playing the role of a victim exploited by Japanese and Western nations for a century.
Pressure on Burma
The change helps explain China's unusually aggressive push for a diplomatic solution to the nuclear standoff on the Korean Peninsula. China has also offered to step into regional disputes in which its interests aren't as clear. For example, when Cambodians staged anti-Thai riots in Phnom Penh earlier this year, the Chinese Foreign Ministry summoned the Thai ambassador in Beijing and offered its assistance.
China also agreed last month to work with Thailand to help break the political deadlock in Burma and coax the nation toward democracy, Thai officials said. Beijing has consistently backed Burma's military government, but some human rights activists believe it might be willing to put pressure on the junta despite its own poor record on democratic reform.
“I think China is increasingly worried about Burma as a source of drugs and AIDS, and there is a growing awareness that Burma is a potential source of international embarrassment,” said Debbie Stothard, director of Altsean-Burma, a human rights group.
China says its rising influence is not a threat to the United States because its top priority is maintaining stability, which allows it to focus on economic growth and domestic problems. China has also acknowledged the importance of the U.S. presence in Asia and said it has no intention of replacing it.
In addition, because China lacks a blue-water navy and probably will not be able to develop one for decades, it is as dependent on the U.S. military as other nations to maintain the security of the shipping lanes it uses to bring in oil, gas and other critical raw materials, said Hugh White, director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and a former official in the Australian Defense Department.
The United States recently completed a free trade agreement with Singapore and has opened talks about a similar pact with Thailand. In addition, the United States has strengthened military ties with Singapore, the Philippines and Thailand as part of its war on terrorism.
Panitan Wattanayagorn, a security expert at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, said most nations in Asia are trying to strike a balance between China and the United States, eager to enjoy the benefits of good relations with both.
“Because U.S.-China relations are good right now, and their interests in the region don't appear to be in conflict, these countries haven't had to choose,” he said. “But this kind of balancing is a dangerous game. A small country can't control what happens between the big powers. It has to be careful not to be caught in between.”